Unfamiliar Walks

Two excerpts from two different pieces composed for the project. Each piece is conceived as a collection of different presets any of those embedding some pseudo-random processes which makes any preset sound slightly different anytime is selected.

Unfamiliar walks is a series of generative pieces composed for “Healing Soundscapes” a collaborative project between the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg (HfMT), Universitätsklinikum Eppendorf (UKE) and the Medical School Hamburg (MSH). The goal of the project was to investigate how the exposure to generative environments may contribute to the well-being of patients in hospital’s waiting and emergency rooms and thus mitigating what are usually perceived as stressful scenarios. The project was conducted both by students and faculties of the music therapy and multimedia composition programmes and has offered rare insights into the dynamic of such undertakings, covering both the therapeutic underpinnings as well as the technical means required to achieve specific results. For this project I composed two sets of pieces, and developed the GUI with whom patients interact together with the engine that manages the samples, now part of the Maxscore suite.

A screenshot of the GUI. On top the name of the composer, the piece and the preset selected. The “previous” and “skip/next” arrows allow the user to random audition different pieces, presets and even 5 minutes of silence.